All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

calculate the total size of files in specified directory (in Megabytes)
the command will calculate the size of hidden files

Paste command output to www.pastehtml.com in txt format.
paste(){ curl -s -S --data-urlencode "txt=$($@)" "http://pastehtml.com/upload/create?input_type=txt&result=address";echo;}

Show Directories in the PATH Which does NOT Exist

Run entire shell script as root
Placing sudo in the shebang line of a shell script runs the entire thing as root. Useful for scripts designed to, e.g. automate system upgrades or package manager wrappers — makes prepending everything with sudo no longer necessary

Display screen window number in prompt
Add this to your $HOME/.bashrc file. It will only set this prompt if it is running inside screen ($WINDOW var is set) Looks like this... $ ion@atomos:~[2]$

Automatically find and re-attach to a detached screen session
-RR option is used to resume the first appropriate detached screen session

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Getting the ip address of eth0

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Find the package that installed a command


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: